Bernard Williams once posed the awkward question, What is the point of doing philosophy if you’re not extraordinarily good at it? The problem is that you can’t, by sheer hard work, like a historian of modest gifts, make solid discoveries that others can then rely on in building up larger results. If you’re not extraordinary, much of what you do in philosophy will … [probably] be both unoriginal and wrong. That is why most of the philosophy of the past is not worth studying. So isn’t there something absurd about paying thousands of people to think about these fundamental questions?
—Thomas Nagel, Other Minds
In 2018, the investor William H. “Bill” Miller donated $75 million to the philosophy department at Johns Hopkins University, the biggest of its kind to any philosophy department (Carrig 2018). The act of charity was hailed as laudable because it would (supposedly) encourage social goods made possible by philosophical study: fostering critical thought, enriching lives, supporting a just society, and discovering fundamental philosophical truths. Who could object? Society needs voters and citizens capable of informed, critical thought. However, while Miller’s generosity cannot be denied, what can be denied is that his donation was a good use of finite financial resources. The thesis of this paper can be stated as follows:
One shouldn’t donate money to academic philosophy. That money will most likely fund marginal philosophers who produce poor-quality work with low opportunity costs, or marginal philosophers who produce highquality work with high opportunity costs because donations could draw them away from work that is more productive overall and does more good.
My thesis focuses on whether a donor or politician, lacking the ability to change the incentives and operations in academia too radically, would have good enough reason either to increase or to continue current funding levels for academic philosophy. There are, of course, related questions, like whether to restructure academia or alter its heavy reliance on publishing to make personnel decisions. However, those tangential issues are beyond the scope of this paper. So the concern here is solely on whether donating to academic philosophy would waste resources, given the current academic regime, and whether that means one should fund academic philosophy at less than status quo levels. One may object that the narrow focus of the thesis pushes aside difficult and interesting questions. However, it is rather that such challenging questions would be neglected if the scope of the paper were broadened.
Some critics have defended the donation to Johns Hopkins University. As the philosopher Ram Neta wrote on a professional philosophy blog,
[This] donation won’t immediately save any lives…. But the same is true of all resources dedicated to creative or scholarly activity of any kind. None of these activities aim to save lives immediately. But all of them aim (with whatever level of success) to cultivate understanding, appreciation, and sensitivity. And those qualities can save far more lives than any charity can. Imagine the consequences for human well-being … if these qualities had been effectively cultivated in every American voter. (Quoted in Weinberg 2018; see also Kazez 2018)
Neta’s point is that philosophy isn’t (and shouldn’t be) aimed at directly relieving suffering, or stopping early death, but that those are the long-term outcomes of doing good philosophy. As with many worthy endeavors, even if the result makes the world a better place, the immediate aim is often something else entirely. As I explain throughout the paper, idealistic niceties aside, there are solid reasons for giving philosophy less funding, including aspirational donations.
Moreover, Neta’s defense of funding philosophy is weak for a couple of reasons. First, the defense is too idealistic: the prospect of cultivating appreciation and compassion in voters is dim, to put it mildly. Individual voters are rationally uninformed because their single vote, whether informed or not, is extremely unlikely to decide the outcome of an election (Caplan 2008; Brennan 2016). Second, it is hard to know the effects of a donation prior to making it. Donors lack the local and specific knowledge required to pick an effective charity, just as politicians and bureaucrats lack the required knowledge to centrally plan an economy (Hayek 1945). And as this paper unfolds, it should become clear that such donations are often better spent elsewhere.
Before arguing that one shouldn’t fund philosophy more, and even that one should fund it less, it is worth highlighting
